True at First Light is a book by American writer Ernest Hemingway about his 1953–54 safari in Kenya with his fourth wife Mary. It was released posthumously in his centennial year in 1999. In the book, which blends memoir and fiction, Hemingway explores conflict within a marriage, the conflict between the European and native cultures in Africa, and the fear a writer feels when his work becomes impossible. True at First Light includes descriptions of his earlier friendships with other writers and digressive ruminations on the nature of writing.
Hemingway began writing the book after he and his wife were involved in two plane crashes in the African bush in a two-day period in January 1954. He spent much of the next two years in Havana, recuperating and writing the manuscript of what he called "the Africa book", which remained unfinished at the time of his suicide in July 1961. Hemingway's son Patrick edited the work to half its original length to strengthen the underlying storyline and emphasize the fictional aspects.
True at First Light received mostly negative or lukewarm reviews from the popular press and sparked a literary controversy regarding whether, and how, an author's work should be reworked and published after his death. Unlike critics in the popular press, Hemingway scholars generally consider True at First Light to be complex and a worthy addition to his canon of later fiction.
Background Hemingway went on safari to Africa in 1933 with his second wife Pauline and always intended to return. That visit inspired Hemingway's book Green Hills of Africa and his short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", both well-known works in the Hemingway canon. Two decades later in 1953, having finished writing The Old Man and the Sea, he planned a trip to Africa to visit his son Patrick who lived in Tanganyika. When Look magazine offered to send him to Africa, paying $15,000 for expenses, $10,000 for rights to a 3500 word piece about the trip, and Earl Theisen as official photographer to go with him, he quickly accepted. Hemingway and Mary left Cuba in June, traveling first to Europe to make arrangements and leaving from Venice to Tanganyika a few months later. They arrived in August, and Hemingway was thrilled to be deputized as an honorary ranger, writing in a letter, "due to emergency [the Mau Mau rebellion] been acting game ranger". Philip Percival, Hemingway's safari guide in 1933, joined the couple for the four-month expedition; they traveled from the banks of the Salengai, where Earl Theisen photographed Hemingway with a herd of elephants, to the Kimana Swamp, the Rift Valley and then on to visit Patrick in central Tanganyika. After visiting Patrick at his farm, they settled for two months on the north slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. During this period, Percival left their camp to return to his farm, leaving Hemingway as game warden with local scouts reporting to him. Hemingway was proud to be a game warden and believed a book would come of the experience.
On January 21, Hemingway chartered a sightseeing flight of the Congo Basin as a late Christmas present to Mary; two days later, on their way to photograph Murchison Falls from the air, the plane hit an abandoned utility pole and crashed, with the passengers sustaining minor injuries. That night, they camped in the bush waiting for a response to their distress call. The crash site was seen by a passing airliner that reported no survivors, and the news of Hemingway's death was telegraphed around the world. The next day, they were found and picked up by a bush pilot, but his de Havilland caught fire during take-off, crashed and exploded, which left Hemingway with a concussion, scalp wound, double-vision, intermittent hearing in his left ear, a crushed vertebra, ruptured liver, spleen and kidney, and burns. The explosion burned their passports, "thirty rolls of exposed film, three pairs of Ernest's bifocals, all of their money, and their $15,000 letter of credit." The group traveled to Entebbe in Uganda by road, where journalists from around the world had gathered to report his death. On January 26, Hemingway briefed and joked with the reporters, and spent the next few weeks in Nairobi recuperating and reading his obituaries. During his recuperation, Hemingway immediately prepared the piece for Look. The magazine paid him an additional $20,000 for an exclusive about the plane crashes. Biographer Michael Reynolds wrote that the piece "ran for twenty magazine pages spread out over two issues", with the first issue bearing a publication date of 26 January.
In spite of his injuries, Hemingway joined Patrick and his wife on a planned fishing trip in February, but he was irascible and difficult to get along with. When a bushfire broke out, Hemingway fell into the fire while helping extinguish the flames, burning himself on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. Months later in Venice, Hemingway was diagnosed with two cracked discs, a kidney and liver rupture, a dislocated shoulder, and a broken skull.
As soon as Hemingway returned to Finca Vigía in Cuba, he began work on a book about the safari, wanting to write while it was still vivid in his memory. He quickly wrote 10,000 words, despite his pain (eventually the manuscript grew to about 800 pages). In September 1954, Hemingway wrote in a letter, "At present I work at about 1/2 the capacity I should but everything is better all the time." However, three months later in late December he wrote in a letter: "This has been sort of a rough year .... We call this 'black-ass' and one should never have it. But I get tired of pain sometimes, even if that is an ignoble feeling."
Almost a year later in October 1955, he declared: "Am passed 650 pages in the book. Am trying to write now like a good sorcer's (sic) apprentice ... always start to write as an apprentice. By the end of the book you are a master but if you commence as master in writing anyway, you end as a bloody bore." Two months later, Hemingway was bedridden with kidney disease. By January 1956, he acknowledged, in a letter written on the second anniversary of the accidents, that he was having trouble remembering the trip. In 1956, Hemingway agreed to work on the filming of The Old Man and the Sea and abandoned work on "the Africa book". He wrote to his editor, "I found it impossible to resume writing on the Africa book." Hemingway put the manuscript in a safe-deposit box in Havana, although after the 1959 Cuban revolution he feared the manuscript lost.
Synopsis True at First Light is set in 1950s-British Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion. In his introduction, Patrick Hemingway describes the Kikuyu and Kamba tribes at the time of the Mau-Mau rebellion. He explains that if the Kamba had joined the rebellion, Ernest and Mary Hemingway "would have then stood a good chance of being hacked to death in their beds as they slept by the very servants they so trusted and thought they understood." The book takes place in December while the narrator, Ernest, and his wife, Mary, are in a safari camp in the Kenyan highlands on the flank of Mt. Kilimanjaro, where they find themselves temporarily at risk when a group of Mau-Mau rebels escape from jail.
The blend of travel memoir and fiction opens with the white hunter Philip Percival leaving the safari group to visit his farm, handing control of the camp to Ernest, who is worried about being attacked and robbed, because there are guns, alcohol, and food in the camp. Deputized as an assistant game warden, he makes daily rounds in the game reserve and maintains communication with the local tribes. He is accompanied by two African game scouts, Chungo and Arap Meina and, for a period, the district game warden G.C (Gin Crazed). Other camp members include Keiti, who runs the camp, the safari cook, Mbebia, and two stewards, Nguili and Msembi.
For six months, Mary has been tracking a large black-maned lion, determined to finish the hunt by Christmas. In subsequent chapters, Ernest worries that Mary is unable to kill the lion for various reasons: she is too short to see the prey in the tall grass; she misses her shots with other game; and he thinks she is too soft-hearted to kill the animal. During this period, Ernest becomes entranced with Debba, a woman from a local village, whom the others jokingly refer to as his second wife. From her and the villagers he wants to learn tribal practices and customs.
When Mary's lion is finally killed at the book's halfway mark, the local shamba (village) gathers for a ngoma (dance). Because she has dysentery, Mary leaves for Nairobi to see a doctor; while she is gone Ernest kills a leopard, after which the men have a protracted ngoma. When Mary returns from Nairobi, she asks Ernest for an airborne sightseeing tour of the Congo Basin as a Christmas present.
Ernest describes his close relationships with the local men; indulges in memories of previous relationships with writers such as George Orwell, and D.H. Lawrence; and satirizes the role of organized religion. Subjects as diverse as the smell of the pine woods in Michigan, the nature of Parisian cafés, and the quality of Simenon's writing are treated with stream of consciousness digressions.
The back of the book includes a section titled "Cast of Characters", a Swahili glossary, and the editor's acknowledgments.
Publication history
The ownership of Hemingway's manuscripts is complicated. Two books have been published from the African book manuscript: True at First Light, edited by Patrick Hemingway, and Under Kilimanjaro, edited by scholars Robert Lewis and Robert Fleming. In 1965, Mary Hemingway established the Hemingway Foundation, and in the 1970s she donated her husband's papers to the John F. Kennedy Library. A group of Hemingway scholars met in 1980 to assess the donated papers when they formed the Hemingway Society, "committed to supporting and fostering Hemingway scholarship". After Mary Hemingway's 1986 death, Hemingway's sons John and Patrick asked the Hemingway Society to take on the duties of the Hemingway Foundation; in 1997 the Hemingway Estate and the Hemingway Society/Foundation agreed to a two-part publishing plan for the African book. An abridged trade publication of True at First Light was to be published in 1999, to be edited by Patrick Hemingway; the Hemingway Foundation would then oversee the reworking of the entire text, to be published as Under Kilimanjaro. Of Under Kilimanjaro, the editors claim "this book deserves as complete and faithful a publication as possible without editorial distortion, speculation, or textually unsupported attempts at improvement".
In the early 1970s, portions of the manuscript had been serialized in Sports Illustrated and anthologized.Blumenthal, Ralph. A New Book By Hemingway; Blend of Life and Fiction Tells of African Bride The New York Times. 14 August 1998. Retrieved 2010-02-09 Mary Hemingway approved the segments published by Sports Illustrated: segments described by Patrick Hemingway as a "straight account of a shooting safari". In a 1999 talk presented at the annual Oak Park Hemingway Society dinner, Patrick Hemingway admitted ownership of Ernest Hemingway's manuscripts had "a rather tortuous history". Access to the Africa manuscript—and to other Hemingway material—required a lawsuit and an eventual agreement with the Hemingway Society.
Scribner's requested a book of fewer than 100,000 words. Patrick Hemingway worked for two years with the 200,000-word manuscript—initially converting to an electronic format, and then editing out superfluous material. He strengthened the storyline, and eliminated long descriptive passages with disparaging remarks about family members and living persons. He explains the manuscript was a draft lacking "ordinary housekeeping chores" such as character names. The cuts made, he said, maintained the integrity of the story and "the reader is not deprived of the essential quality of the book".